"I will not minimise my reasons so that they are palatable... I do not answer to the state"

I had not come across this before, even though it was on Samizdata this time last year. I came across it on the Oxford Libertarian blog.

I recently had the unpleasant experience of being 'interviewed' by a civil servant 'with attitude' ( unlike the relatively passive Canadian civil servant) it was not an interview its was an interrogation. Even so my hat goes off to Ezra Levant for the fury he displayed after being dragged in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission following after he republished the Danish Cartoons, and two muslim groups complained.

"It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and, in this case, religious freedom, and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta 'Human Rights' Commission would be the government agency violating my human rights... We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of 800 years of British Common Law's protection of free speech, augmented by 250 years of Common Law in Canada... For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher, or anyone else, to an investigation to be quizzed about his political and religious expression is a violation of 800 years of Common Law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our Bill of Rights and our Charter of Rights... It is a system that is part-Kafka, and part-Stalin."